After work today, I decided I wanted to install the Sony-Ericsson PC Suite on my work laptop, so I could synchronize my Outlook calendar/notes etc. onto my private phone. Now, Sony-Ericsson must not have liked my last post about switching to the HTC Touch Diamond, because installing the SE PC Suite turned out to be a really bad idea…

(If you came here looking for a way to synchronize your HTC Touch Diamond with ZYB, have a look at this post in stead)

Installation went smoothly and the software looks great, easily found my phone and I thought everything was great! But no – my first synchronization crashed the software. Retried and the same result. So I figured it had something to do with Outlook (doesn’t it always?), so I unchecked the calendar, notes etc. and the synchronization went through and all my contacts had been copied to my machine – so far so good.

Then I decided to see if opening Outlook would help anything. And, much to my surprise, Outlook did not open my regular account – it just opened as if no accounts had been set up. NOT good! I google’d around (but not too much) for an answer, but it seemed I was the only one unfortunate enough for this to happen to. I tried some more tweaks, but still no complete synchronization and nothing to see in Outlook.

So I went ahead and uninstalled the software in the hopes that Outlook would return to normal. And it did, so no harm done there – I just had to live with the fact that I couldn’t do the calendar synchronization. Annoying. So I closed my laptop and as I did that, I received an SMS. The SMS was from “Uden navn” (“No name”) – uh oh…

Yes, the synchronization had deleted my entire phone book. It had deleted all the names of my contacts and had also added some more nameless contacts. No software should allow this to happen – 200+ contacts out the window! A programmer should definitely put in a check to see if all contacts are nameless before they are transferred – I don’t think anyone has a phone book with 200 nameless people. Yet another reason to switch phone (even though I’ve always stuck with SE).

But fortunately, Martin Mærsk-Møller had shown me ZYB. And, as interested in technology, I of course had to sign up and try it. It synchronizes your contacts (and calendar as well I think) and it’s as easy to use as it possibly can be – you just click synchronize once the settings are in and you’re done! And it’s free…

Within five minutes I had everything restored. I deleted all contacts in my phone book, went to the Contacts section on ZYB, checked all the contacts that I wanted to get back, clicked export, saved the file on my desktop, transferred it to my phone via Bluetooth and voilá: Everything back to normal.

So, thank you ZYB!! And no thanks to you, Sony Ericsson PC suite – this (bad synchronization options) is one of the main reasons I’m going elsewhere…